Soon after, for Thomas also, there had come other things to think about, with the end of his time as a training officer, and promotion to his first command. He had wished at the time that he knew how much of that was due to his gifts as a soldier, and how much to his friendship with the Viceroy’s younger son; but promotion in the British army depended too often on another man’s death, or purchase-power or the fact that one’s father knew the right general, for it to worry him very deeply. He had received his promotion gladly, since it meant a posting south, back to the desert and the frontiers again, and the command of a Bedouin cavalry regiment.
That had been a good year, and heralded in by an event, small in itself but great to him, that was worthy of it. For a few days before he left Cairo for the south, he had returned to his quarters late into the evening, to find Medhet waiting for him exactly as he had done on the eve of the Sudan expedition.
Abdul had already lit the candles in the three-branched candlestick, and they had stood and looked at each other by their light. They had seen each other more than once since that other time; but always in the distance, always in the by-going. And Thomas had known that it must be left that way, until, in the Pattern of Things, the time came round, if ever it did …
Now it seemed that the time was here.
“Ibrahim Agha …” the boy began, and seemed not to know how to go on.
“Medhet,” Thomas said, and waited.
“The last time I came to you with a request, I was but a boy —”
“And now there are grey hairs in your beard?”
The other shook his head. “Do not laugh at me. Nay, but I grow older and wiser. Also I have spoken — more than once — with Donald al Hakim, and from him also I have learned a little from time to time. And now” — he had been very grave, but suddenly the beginning of the old wicked grin was there — “now it has been told me that Ibrahim Agha goes south in three days, and I come to make the same request again, being weary of cities.”
“So, and what makes you think that I can pluck a man from another regiment to follow at my heel with greater ease now than I could that first time?”
“It has been told to me that Ibrahim Agha is a great man and lord of a cavalry regiment. To such a one, ways are open that are still closed to a training officer with no command of his own.”
“That has the sound of impudence,” Thomas told him, aware with relief that he would never again be, to this valiant urchin, something beyond the sum of normal men. That was gone, and in its place he sensed a better-rooted and more durable relationship that would be less taxing to live with. “I will do what I can,” he said.
“Then it is sure. And in three days I ride south with Ibrahim Agha.”
Thomas smiled, “Tho’mas will still serve when we are alone together as we are now.”
And in three days he had ridden south to join his new regiment, with Medhet for his personal aide.
*
A few weeks since, he had returned to a Cairo still reeling with half stunned, half triumphant shock, from the final fall of the Mamelukes, who had been in some sort its masters for six hundred years.
The work had been begun of course by the Sudan campaign, and continued in numberless provincial skirmishes since, but the heart and strongpoint of the freebooting slave-soldier aristocracy had remained in Cairo itself. Remained, that is, until a few weeks ago.
Thomas had contrived not to be physically sick when he heard about it, but even now the taste of black vomit still rose in the back of his throat at the memory. He wished he could have talked about it with Colonel D’Esurier. The French gunnery colonel’s unemotional and objective view might have helped him clear the confusion in his own head. But D’Esurier had returned to France some weeks previously; and his place among Muhammed Ali’s advisers was taken by another man.
Surprisingly, Zeid ibn Hussein, albeit with a dry disdainful look to his mouth, as though he had bitten on a leaf of the bitter aloes, had also taken a realist point of view. “You have not had six hundred years in which to practise hating the Mamelukes,” he had said.
“Neither has His Excellency the Viceroy,” Thomas had pointed out.
“We must assume that His Excellency acts not out of his own desire, but to meet the needs of Egypt. The thing was necessary, Tho’mas, ugly but necessary. If you feel so strongly about it — even remembering their treachery at El Hamed, also that they tried to murder you — give thanks to Allah the All Compassionate that you were out of the way when it happened, and, like me, can show your hands clean without having been ordered to foul them.”
That had pulled Thomas up with a jolt. Zeid had an uncomfortable gift for presenting one with choices, even choices that one had not in fact had to make. He was indeed thankful that he had not been ordered to play any part in that final hideous massacre. Sometimes, as here in this austere little chamber of Donald’s, which also had a way of bringing one face to face with such questions, he wondered what he would have done if he had been involved. He wished he could be sure that he would have had the courage to fling down his sword. Even with the memory of friends and comrades betrayed and rotting at El Hamed, he wished it. But he was not sure; and sitting here in the fading light with the faint evening airs stirring in the branches of the shade-trees outside the window, he accepted for the first time the fact that he never would be.
He was Ibrahim Agha, commander of two regiments of proud desert cavalry, and Tussun’s chief of staff in the forthcoming campaign; but he would carry always with him that small ugly doubt, like an old wound that aches when the wind is in the east.
Tussun also had travelled a long way in those two and a half years; Tussun, appointed commander of his father’s expedition against the Wahabis, and created Pasha of Jiddah for the occasion. He had two sons of his own now, and had lost his boyhood somewhere in the Mameluke troubles. Too many of his boyhood friends had been drawn from their swashbuckling ranks, so that for him the troubles had had something of the especial cruelty of civil war that divides father from son, brother from brother, friend from friend …
The room was sinking away in the dusk. Below in the hospital garden the voices fell silent, as the gardeners finished the evening watering, left the great jars dripping by the cistern and went home. From time to time footsteps came and went along the corridor. A rim of apricot light began to show round the edge of the part-open door from some lamp kept burning at the near-by stair-head through the hours of darkness.
Presently the door was pushed wide, and Donald’s tall shape appeared, bulking darkly against the apricot glow. “Och now, here’s a dismal way to be sitting in the dark,” he said.
“I didn’t notice.”
The big Lewis man crossed to the table, and producing his tinderbox from the folds of his waist-shawl, set to lighting the lamp.
Thomas watched the flame flare and steady, and Donald’s face and the careful hands tending the small laurel-leaf of light take form and substance as the shadows drew back. “Is all well?” he asked.
Donald’s gaze, startlingly blue in the upward lamplight, came up to meet his, with a clear cool look of content in it. “Aye, all is well — for this while, anyway.”
For Donald at least, the choice had been a good one, and the way ahead lay clear.
Thomas drew his legs under him to get up, “I am glad.”
“Need you go yet? Bide a while longer, and Selim shall bring us more coffee.”
Thomas shook his head and finished getting up. “I must get back. We ride at dawn.”
He had a sudden acute awareness of the small lamp lit cell as being a threshold place; behind him the chapter of his life that had begun at El Hamed, the new chapter waiting for him tomorrow, when the Arab cavalry rode out for Port Suez. At the same moment it came to him that this night might very possibly be the last time that he would see Osman al Hakim, who had once been Donald MacLeod of the 78th.
“The Sun and the Moon on your path,” he said, using the old Highland form of v
alediction.
“And on yours,” Donald answered. “And on you, Thomas Dhu.”
In the doorway Thomas checked and half turned, looking back over his shoulder. There was something more, small and almost overlooked, that must be said now lest there be no other time. “Thank you for Medhet.”
Part Two – Arabia
17
The ancient caravan road from the north rose and dipped with the undulations of the land, through a world that extended no further in any direction than the nearest rocky outcrop of scimitar-curved dune crest, and each ridge and dune crest so like the last that you seemed to carry your own narrow world with you as you went. The early autumn rains had conjured the first wash of green over the desert here and there, but the thin grey scrub of aromatic things, the occasional twisted terebinth tree among the rocks, looked as though life would never reach out a finger to them again.
It had been much the same, except in the few oases, all the long thirty-three days’ march from Port Suez. But for Thomas, riding at the head of his Bedouin cavalry, it had a more familiar feel to it than Cairo had ever done. Coming as he had, straight from the world of his Highland regiment to the world of an Arab frontier post, with virtually no contact with the Turkish world of his captors between, the desert had taken him over and become the home of his spirit in the way that the great city and the life that was lived there had never done. Not that he did not hate the desert at times, for all that, as seamen know what it is to hate the sea.
The rain had been too little and too many days ago to leave any trace now on the track, and the dusty sand rose in clouds from the horses’ hooves, so that as he looked back the weary columns blurred away into the smoke of it that altogether hid the baggage train and artillery camels bringing up the rear. His throat was dry and his eyes bleared, and he felt gritty from head to foot. But it would be worse for Zeid, riding with the rear-guard in the rolling dust of the regiments ahead.
Three years of shipbuilding had seemed an inconceivable delay, and as its purpose became known, the army had fretted with impatience, Thomas with the rest, Tussun most of all. But now he could see that the building period had not been wasted. Other work had been going forward at the same time, work of diplomacy and logistics, that had had no outward showing at the time; the labours of nameless men wearing the faces of merchants and caravan masters out beyond the frontiers of their own world. So the way had been made ready for the coming of the expeditionary force. Wells had been cleared out, the forts along the way properly garrisoned and provided with full grain stores and magazines; and respect if not friendship gained from the local tribesmen, who had not, until that time, experienced fort commanders who paid for the camels they commandeered. And so the whole march had been accomplished without a shot fired in anger.
The track began to rise, and up ahead of them a flurry of shouting broke out from the advance guard. Thomas’s thoughts snapped back to the immediate time and place, and he straightened in the saddle. This must be the end of the journey.
A few minutes later he crested the ridge, and saw before him through the dust of the advance guard the white walls of Yembo among its cock-hackled palm trees, surrounded by something that looked more like a vast Bedouin encampment than the base camp of the Egyptian army, and overlooking the fleet of troop transports at anchor in the harbour.
They knew already from the report of their scouts that the Viceroy’s infantry force had arrived by sea ten days ago, and the small garrison — not Wahabis but troops set there by the Grand Shariff of Mecca, who was himself only an extremely half-hearted ally of Saud ibn Saud the Tiger of Arabia — had put up the merest token resistance, for appearance’s sake, before surrendering. The townspeople, for the most part traders from all the ends of the earth, with no special allegiance to either side, had warmly welcomed the expeditionary force, reported the scouts, reckoning to grow fat on its coming.
Ahead of him, Thomas saw the commander-in-chief, who had ridden forward with the advance guard to catch the first sight of the port, turn in the saddle, waving wildly and setting his horse dancing with his own excitement. He flung up his arm in response, and reined his mare aside from the weary column.
“Ride back to ibn Hussein, and tell him Yembo is in sight,” he ordered Medhet who had followed him. “Like the wind!”
And the boy wrenched his horse round in a smother of dust, and with a shrill cry was gone, full gallop. Thomas wheeled his own mare, heeled her into a hand-canter, and rode back down the ragged column at a less headlong pace, calling the news as he went, together with orders to his men to straighten themselves up.
“Awake, my brothers, my children! Yembo waits over the next rise, to see how the Arab cavalry ends a desert march, in column of three, riding straight in the saddle! Wake, and do not cause your mothers to weep for shame that ever they bore you!”
Here and there, hands were flung up in acknowledgment; he saw standards that had been sagging all ways brought back to the perpendicular, weary men straightening in their saddles, pulling their garments to rights, urging their tired mounts back from the straggle they had become into some semblance of a cavalry column, and his heart swelled within him for pride of them, because they were his, and also for exasperation at their slowness.
So at last the regiments, in something raggedly resembling columns of three, their sick lying across the baggage camels, but their heads up, their horses gathered to a trot to the liquid throbbing of the kettledrums, their pennants lifting lightly out on the wind of their going, headed down the last slope into Yembo.
*
Something over a fortnight later the whole expeditionary force was still there, and in the commander’s tent a council of war was sitting.
Tussun had much more luxurious lodgings in the town house of the local shariff, but it had seemed better that the matters they had to discuss should be dealt with in his long black tent in the midst of the encampment, where there would be less risk of the wrong ears overhearing what was said.
Thomas, who had spent the greater part of the day, as he had spent the greater part of every day since their arrival, keeping his troops in proper shape to ride out again when the order came — as by the Mercy of Allah it must surely come sometime! — leaned back on an elbow against the camel saddle behind him, and studied the faces of the men gathered about the coffee hearth, some almost strange to him, some long familiar. He saw the faces of the two infantry aghas, that of Salah the Albanian with his hot blue eyes and mouth drawn tight with impatience, the olive-skinned Turkish features of Umar schooled into better control. He saw Zeid ibn Hussein, his cheeks a little more hollow, his eyes a little narrower than they had been at El Hamed, his long fingers playing in the old delicate way with the ears of the saluki who had followed him in. For a moment the narrowed eyes met Thomas’s with a flicker of sympathy for his impatience with the slowness of the proceedings.
Thomas’s promotion to overall command of the cavalry, Arab, Turkish and Albanian, while Zeid who had been his captain and his tutor was set to command a single cavalry regiment under him, might well have strained the old friendship between them. It had not done so, and Thomas gave the credit for that where it was due. His gaze drifted on to Tussun Pasha, their commander-in-chief and the youngest and least experienced of them all, his turban tipped as rakishly as ever over one ear, but his face harsher and less joyful than it had used to be. Tussun’s lion-tawny eyes, with a frown bitten deep between them, were fixed just now on the papers which a short while before had been passing from hand to hand and now lay beside the coffee hearth in their midst.
In the silence Thomas heard the passing steps of the sentries outside, and beyond them the sounds of the camp waking to the evening. On the closed back of the tent shadows passed, black against the reddish glow of the sunset seeping through the tent cloth; from the looped back front a little chill air came in — the nights were beginning to be cold — bringing the scent of burning camel-dung from the evening cooking fires. The saluki sat up and s
cratched, long and luxuriously.
Tussun’s first act on arriving at Yembo had been to send word to the Grand Shariff at Mecca, to inform him that a powerful force of his allies was now in the Holy Land to free it from the grinding and tyrannical yoke of the Wahabis, and to remind him of the promise which it seemed (despite the token resistance of the Yembo garrison) he had made, to call out the tribes and his own Mecca and Jiddah troops to support it. But it seemed that the situation in the Hijaz, the Holy Land, was not at all what certain of the Viceroy’s contacts had given him to believe, their reports being based more on what they thought he would wish to hear than on the actual facts.
The answer to Tussun’s letter had returned yesterday, and was one of the papers now lying beside the coffee hearth. Thomas had taken and read it when it was passed round the council circle; but in truth he had first read it yesterday within a few minutes of its arrival at Tussun’s quarters; the only one who had done so; the only one who had witnessed the young commander’s fury.